Saskatchewan Pulse Growers and J4 Agri-Science Create a New Collaboration in Faba Bean Breeding

Jun 04, 2025

Saskatchewan Pulse Growers (SPG) and J4 Agri-Science (J4) are excited to announce a new collaboration for faba bean breeding in Saskatchewan. This new collaboration has a commercial focus and will create additional pulse breeding capacity locally in Saskatchewan, increasing competition, and creating a strong environment to foster innovation.

Developing new and better performing varieties of faba beans is the focus of the breeding collaboration. Farmers’ priorities and greatest production challenges are at the forefront of the program, with major areas of focus including low vicine/convicine levels, early maturity, improved yield, and improved disease resistance. Breeding will take place in Saskatchewan for the benefit of Saskatchewan producers.

“SPG is excited about this latest new collaboration on faba bean breeding in Saskatchewan. Faba beans are a promising crop for farmers and offers an alternate pulse crop to extend rotations in certain areas experiencing root rot pressures. Additional new eyes to challenges around maturity, yield, and disease will create competitive varieties for growers” says Winston van Staveren, Chair of SPG Board of Directors.

The J4 faba bean breeding program is based in Saskatchewan, with an office in Saskatoon, main testing site in Northeastern Saskatchewan, and additional selection and testing sites across the Western Canadian prairies. “J4 is passionate in its quest to advance grain farming across the Canadian Prairies. J4 is dedicated to bringing new and desired genetics to Saskatchewan growers in multiple crops, especially in crops that are currently under-served in their development.” notes Jodi Souter, Co-Founder and Breeder with J4. “This new collaboration will stimulate innovation and efficient variety development in Saskatchewan.”

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Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”